Chinatown : Few Hours’ Stroll Takes the Visitor Past Sites Marking 2 Centuries of Immigration to the Area

With its growing ethnic communities, Los Angeles has become known as America’s new Ellis Island. Since its founding in 1781, however, when 44 black, mulatto, mestizo, Indian and Spanish settlers arrived to found the Pueblo, Los Angeles always has portrayed a global village.

Perhaps no neighborhood in Los Angeles reflects this multiracial history as clearly as does the city’s oldest district of Chinatown. Located north of downtown Los Angeles, the area has experienced successive waves of new immigrants, including Indian, Spanish, Mexican, Italian, French, Chinese, Anglo-American, Filipino, Croatian, Vietnamese and Cambodian.

This three-hour walking tour explores landmarks reflecting the Pueblo’s multiracial history, as well as providing an overview of the area’s rich historic architecture, ethnic eateries, crowded shopping streets, pedestrian pathways and cultural monuments.

Enter the New Year

Further, as Monday marks the Chinese New Year, followed by Lion Dances throughout Chinatown on Feb. 12, the Chinatown Community Carnival on Feb. 17-19 and the traditional Golden Dragon Parade on Feb. 18, this is an ideal time to explore the area.

The walk begins at Union Station on Alameda Street, where parking is $4. This is one of the last great rail-passenger terminals built in the country, was designed by John and Donald Parkinson and built in the late ‘30s. Los Angeles’ Old Chinatown once stood at this site, until it was demolished for the station’s Spanish Moderne facilities, which still welcome thousands of train passengers each day.

Cross Alameda Street and walk west toward the Plaza. On the northwest corner of Alameda and Los Angeles streets stands the Placita de Dolores, a plaza decorated with a tile mural by Eduardo Carrillo, and a replica of the Bell of Dolores, commemorating the Mexican Revolution.

In front of the Placita grows a small garden of native plants, dedicated to the history and culture of the native California Indians.

As many as 200 Indians once lived in Yang-na, the Basin’s largest Indian village, which existed near present-day City Hall.

On Aug. 2, 1769, the Spanish soldiers and padres on the Portola Expedition, the first Europeans to explore the region, stayed overnight along the river near Yang-na. Upon seeing the clear, sweet waters of the river, with its rich black soil, flowering wild roses, huge sycamore trees and wild grapes, the site was praised as ideal for a future settlement.

Walk south along Los Angeles Street, noting the statue of Junipero Serra set in the trees across the street. Father Serra, who established the first nine of California’s 21 missions, also was responsible for much of the missionization of the Indians, who were forced to leave their villages and work on the mission lands.

Modern Los Angeles began humbly on Sept. 4, 1781, when 44 poor settlers arrived from Mexico to found El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, today known simply as Los Angeles. No one knows exactly where these settlers first built their makeshift houses of willow branches, tule reeds and mud. After several floods, however, in 1815 they relocated their little pueblo just north of where the Old Plaza Church is now. In 1818, the Plaza was moved to its present location.

Today, the Plaza area is part of El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park, containing 27 historic structures dating from 1818 to 1926. The park offers for 50 cents an excellent detailed walking-tour brochure that describes most of the sites. Free, docent-led walking tours also are offered Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. to anyone meeting in front of the firehouse.

At 134 Paseo de la Plaza rises the city’s Firehouse No. 1, built in 1884. Inside the two-story brick building is a small firefighters’ museum.

South of the firehouse, at 419 N. Los Angeles St., stands the Garnier Building of red brick and rusticated sandstone. Built in 1890 by Philippe Garnier, it remains the oldest and most important remnant of Los Angeles’ original Chinatown.

Male House Servants

In 1850, the U.S. Census recorded two Chinese male house servants living among the Pueblo’s 1,610 residents. However, as the northern gold fields were played out and new railroad building demanded laborers, many more Chinese immigrated to the Southland. By 1870, more than 200 Chinese lived in the Pueblo.

East of the 400 block of Los Angeles Street once existed the most notorious street in all of Los Angeles: Calle de los Negros. In the 1850s, the dirt alley’s one-story adobe buildings housed saloons, prostitution dens and gambling halls, attracting thugs and thieves and earning it the title “the sinkhole of depravity” by the press.

During the 1860s, many Chinese relocated to the alleyway, which was to become the site of the Pueblo’s worst racial incident, known as the Chinese Massacre.

On Oct. 24, 1871, an Anglo was shot and killed in the cross fire between two rival Chinese tongs, or gangs. Within hours, a hysterical mob of 500 Angelenos besieged and attacked the Chinese residences, brutally lynching 18 Chinese men.

Walk along the south side of the Plaza and turn left on Main Street. The Pico House at 424 N. Main St. was built in 1869-70 by Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. The Italianate-style structure was the Pueblo’s first three-story hotel.

A Century of Theater

Next to the Pico House, at 420 N. Main St., stands the Merced Theater, constructed in 1870 as the city’s first true theater.

The oldest building south of the Plaza is the Masonic Hall at 416 N. Main St., which houses a small museum of Masonic history.

Walk south to Arcadia Street, cross Main Street, turn right and walk to the Mission-style Old Plaza Church at 535 N. Main St. Built between 1818 and 1822, Plaza Church is the city’s oldest Catholic church. A shimmering Byzantine mosaic of the image of Our Lady of the Angels, inspired by a similar mosaic in the Porciuncula Chapel near Assisi, graces the front on the old church.

Walk into the church courtyard to see the shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and then cross Main Street to the Plaza. Paved with bricks, shaded by century-old Moreton Bay fig trees, the Plaza remains the historic heart of Los Angeles and evokes an Old World charm with its pigeons, benches and lacy gazebo.

Rejuvenated Marketplace

Walk north along Olvera Street, the narrow brick alleyway that is lined with 88 booths and shops selling huaraches, pinatas, handblown glass and other Mexican curios. It’s a festive Mexican marketplace today, yet in 1920, the alley was nothing more than a dirt-covered trough lined with crumbling adobes and other aging structures.

When the city condemned the lane, a woman named Christina Sterling recognized its irreplaceable historic heritage and fought to renovate the area as a historical and tourist center.

At No. 10 stands the Avila Adobe, the city’s oldest existing residence, built circa 1818. The house contains historic exhibits on early California rancho life, the history of water in Los Angeles and the life and work of Christina Sterling (see below). (Open Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.-4:25 p.m.)

The historic park’s visitor center is located in the Sepulveda House, at No. W-12, which offers a free film on the history of the Pueblo, a gift shop and bookstore and historic exhibits. (Open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m.)

At the end of Olvera Street, turn left, walk to Main Street and cross Macy Street. Walk one more block west on Macy Street and turn right on Spring Street.

Change of Pace

Suddenly, a commercial setting from old Shanghai surrounds you. Tawdry brick buildings display signs advertising acupuncture and herb shops, Vietnamese cafes, a Chinese cinema and wholesale meats. The sidewalks become more crowded. Smells of fresh seafood and ginseng waft from several storefronts.

In the 1850s, this neighborhood was known as Sonoratown, because hundreds of the gold seekers from the Mexican state of Sonora settled here on their way to the Northern California gold fields.

Later, in the 1930s, Christina Sterling attempted to revitalize the area with a romanticized Chinese-themed tourist center called China City, modeled after her success with Olvera Street. By 1949, after several devastating fires, China City had disappeared. Yee Mee Loo Restaurant, at 690 N. Spring St., established in 1939, reflects a glimmer of China City’s heyday, with its faded photos of Hollywood stars and its 1940s jukebox.

One of Chinatown’s legendary Cantonese seafood restaurants is Monkee’s, at 679 N. Spring St.

Fresh Fowl

For a look at one of Chinatown’s more unusual services, stop at Shang Lee Poultry, at 711 N. Spring St., where chickens, quail, chukar and pigeons are dressed to order. (Be forewarned that watching the fowl being killed can upset even the least squeamish.)

(Although not on our mapped walk, Philippe the Original, one of Los Angeles’ oldest cafes and famous for its French-dip sandwiches, is a block away at the northwest corner of Ord and Alameda Streets.)

Continuing on the mapped walk, turn left on Ord Street. Once this area was the center of Los Angeles’ Italian district, but most recently Vietnamese and Cambodian Chinese have opened cafes, garment outlets and newsstands.

Cross Hill Street and turn left on Yale Street, which parallels Hill. Six aging turn-of-the-century cottages, shaded by tattered avocado trees, line Yale Street, hosting small businesses and fraternal associations.

Turn right on Sunset Boulevard, then turn right on Hill Place, a narrow hillside lane occasionally offering vistas down into the river-side valley where the Pueblo first began. Amazingly, simple Victorian cottages from the late 1800s at Nos. 633, 643, 700, 713, 743 and 747 still edge the quiet street; note the different patterns of shingles, corbels and decorative scrollwork.

Croatian Period

At 756 Hill Place, turn left into the alleyway to the rear door of St. Andrew’s Croatian Church and peer inside. Built in 1910, when a sizeable Yugoslavian community was centered here, the church contains remarkable stained-glass windows and Gothic Revival altars imported from Austria.

Turn right on Grand Avenue and then right again on Alpine Street, which leads downhill into the cultural heart of Chinatown.

Turn left on Yale Street. At the Alpine Recreation Center’s front lawn, many elderly Chinese practice tai chi in the mornings. On the east side of Yale stands Castelar Elementary School, the Chinese Confucian Temple and the Chinatown Branch of the L.A. Public Library.

Turn right on College Street. At No. 531 is French Hospital, the second oldest hospital in Southern California, established in 1860 when this area had a large French community.

Turn left on North Hill Street. Mid-block at Gin Ling Way, walk into Chungking Court, built in the late 1940s as New Chinatown’s West Plaza.

Community Project

Cross Hill Street and walk through the ornate West Gate, the district’s oldest pai lou (gateway). Gin Ling Way leads into the heart of New Chinatown, which was begun in the late 1930s by the Chinese American community, seeking to rebuild what was lost to Union Station. In 1938, New Chinatown broke ground as the nation’s first community to be wholly owned, planned, financed and controlled by its Chinese residents.

As you walk along Gin Ling Way, look up at the ornate roofs and lavish architectural details. Architects Erle Webster and Adrian Wilson worked closely with the community to devise a new style, called “Chinese American.” Masonry and stuccoed, wood-framed buildings were accentuated with intricately carved rafters, upsweeping tile roofs, Chinese-patterned window screens and tiered pagoda-like roofs trimmed in neon.

Stop at Peter Soo Hoo Plaza, which features a plaque honoring both Peter Soo Hoo Sr. and Herbert Lapham, leaders of the New Chinatown project. A statue of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who led the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty, stands in the Plaza’s center.

Turn left at North Broadway and walk to the Phoenix Bakery at No. 969, one of the area’s oldest and busiest bakeries, renowned for its strawberry whipped-cream cake.

Italian Remnant

Turn around and walk south on North Broadway. Little Joe’s Italian Restaurant at 900 N. Broadway, started in 1910 and moved here in 1926, serves as a reminder of the area’s once-thriving Italian community.

North Broadway, with its numerous Chinese cafes, markets, herb and tea shops, is the commercial heart of Chinatown. Exotic scents of incense, ginseng, seafood, live poultry and barbecued duck fill the crowded sidewalks.

A few landmark shops include: Han San Co. for herbs (No. 841); Ten Ren’s Tea and Ginseng Shop for one of the area’s largest and finest selections of Taiwanese teas, where the staff often demonstrates the Chinese tea ceremony (No. 811); United Seafood for live lobster, crab and catfish (419 Alpine St.); Superior Poultry, with live geese, squab, duck, chukar and even rabbits (No. 750).

After exploring the numerous shops and markets, you may want to conclude your walk with dim sum, especially popular at Mirawa Restaurant, at 750 N. Hill St., or A.B.C. Seafood Restaurant, at 205 Ord St., which serve dim sum between noon and 3 p.m.